


stretched to the point of no turning back

by Framlingem



Series: Learning to Fly [2]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Academy Era, Angst, F/M, Gen, Pre-Canon, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-30
Updated: 2010-09-30
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:02:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Framlingem/pseuds/Framlingem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"An Introduction to Practical Astronautics" is a mandatory courseset for Starfleet cadets. For McCoy, it's terrifying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stretched to the point of no turning back

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly". The children's book which I've quoted from is "Moondance", by Frank Asch.

Joanna is four years old when she stumbles. Len doesn't think anything of it, and neither does Jocelyn. She's a kid. Kids stumble from time to time. He strides over, big exaggerated steps, to where she's sitting on her bottom, scoops her up, swings her high, and zooms her around the living room while she spreads her arms and pretends she's a shuttlecraft.

It happens again a couple of weeks later, and in April, Len's reading her the story he's read to her every bedtime she could convince him to since she was old enough to talk. They're reading it together, really - she's only starting to sound most things out, but she knows her lines off by heart and delivers them in her best squeaky voice. She gets hilariously annoyed when Len doesn't cooperate voice-wise, and so he rumbles along in his deepest, bear-iest voice.

"You know what I wish?" rumbles Len. "I wish I could dance with the moon."  
"Maybe she'd like to dance with you too," squeaks Joanna.

  
She's sitting in his lap, one of his arms to either side of her, and he's holding the book in front of her so that she can turn the pages. Only tonight, she can't quite seem to get a grip on the paper. Len frowns a little, blows a raspberry into her hair, and turns the pages for the rest of the story. "Goodnight, Little Bird," he tells her.  
"Goodnight, Bear," she answers, like always. He tucks his daughter into bed like always, pulling the covers up all the way over her face and letting her snatch them down, giggling, like always, turns on her music box like always, turns off the light like always, and pulls the door softly shut. Like always. He leans on the wall in the hallway, and sees the new bruises on Joanna's knees, hears her asking for sandwiches instead of stuff that needs a knife and fork, feels the frustration in her as she tries to turn the page in her favourite book. Jocelyn's working late tonight, some case she's preparing for court tomorrow, and he's waiting for her when she gets home.

"Something ain't right," he says.

Len hates taking his kid to see someone else, but it's been a long time since he did his rotation through pediatrics, and he's damned if his daughter's going to be seen by someone who's rusty, even if it _is_ him. Bobbi's a friend, and he trusts her. She does a basic physical workup, then gets out some toys and plays with Joanna for a while. Len's watching through a one-way mirror so Jo doesn't know he's there, and she's giggly and bubbly and chattering away the whole time. When Bobbi leaves her with some paper and crayons and comes into the observation room, Len's waiting for her with a clenched jaw. Bobbi sighs and tells him, blunt like he would be, "Yeah, something's going on, Joanna's fine motor control isn't where it was at her last checkup, and have you noticed she's slurring her words a little?" Len hasn't, and feels like the worst dad ever, and a little scared. He leaves the office with Joanna riding on his back, telling him all about playing with Bobbi, and a referral to a pediatric neurologist in his pocket. They go to Dairy Queen, and get hot fudge sundaes, and Len can't help staring at her to try to see if she's getting more of it on her face than usual.

Jocelyn's a lawyer, not a doctor, and Len can tell that the Latin she speaks is just enough that she's getting really worried as the neurologist explains what is going on inside their daughter's skull. He wants to take her in his arms, tell her that it's all just a giant misunderstanding, but he can't seem to make his legs and voice work and it'd be a lie besides, and so he sits next to her while she becomes more and more afraid while a man he doesn't know (and he hates that, how dare he be a stranger and how dare he be so fucking sympathetic, it's not _his_ perfect baby girl) tells him that for all intents and purposes his daughter's brain may as well be melting, that she'll lose all her words and degenerate back to babydom and possibly into a coma, that they're going to lose Joanna long before Joanna's body dies.

Joanna's nearly six when Len climbs into bed with her, avoiding various tubes, pulls her into her lap, against his chest, where he can echo the artificial rythms that maintain her, and reads her her bedtime story, Jocelyn sitting by the bed and holding her hand.  
"For a long time, Bear gazed at the Moon. 'She's so special, and I'm just an ordinary bear', he thought."  
Len does the squeaky voice for her, and the deep rumbly voice, and when he's done, he kisses the top of her head. "Goodnight, Little Bird," he tells her. He reaches out and, one by one, he turns off the litte LEDs, the little machines. Jocelyn turns on the music box, and they sit there until it winds down, a frozen little ballerina.

Len goes back to work before his bereavement leave is up, takes the night shift so he gets in before sundown and leaves before sunup, never has to see the moon. The daytime sky's hard enough - full of shuttles that make him think _higher, higher, Daddy! Faster!_ and send him running to the nearest toilet to see if he throws up or not. Sometimes he doesn't.

Len takes the night shift, and Jocelyn takes on more and more cases and has a cot set up at the office. When she walks into the hospital and is there in the waiting area, after he walks out of the OR after being elbow-deep in someone else's kid, to tell him that she can't do this anymore, it's been two months since they've seen each other for more than five minutes at a time. She reminds him that he was in med school when the mortgage was signed, with a crappy credit rating, and so her name's the only one on the papers, and tells him he's got two weeks to find a place. He hasn't been back there in three days anyway. Place is too tidy.

He packs some changes of clothes, buys a bus ticket, dark sunglasses, and a good flask. He's in Iowa when he runs out of money.

 _Fuck it_ , thinks Leonard McCoy.

  
****

  
"Fuck this," says Bones McCoy. "I quit. I'm not doing it."  
He's put up with Introduction to Practical Astronautics I and II. He's nearly comfortable in zero-gravity, hasn't lost the vomit battle in _months_ , knows all the emergency procedures, but he'll be in Sick Bay for crissakes, the most protected area of the ship, and what the hell does he need to go EVA for? The only medicine that can be done if anything goes wrong in vacuum is to slap a patch onto a suit and tow the person to the nearest airlock so that a real surgeon can get at them, and six-year-olds can work a bicycle repair kit. IPA III is a waste of his time and it's a waste of Starfleet dollars putting him through it. He tells Jim so, loudly, at length, and with much gesturing.

The bastard's unsympathetic. He's actually grinning as he double-checks the seals on Bones's suit and turns around so that Bones can do the same for him. Which Bones does, because even if the kid's an idiot bastard, he doesn't deserve to have all his capillaries ruptured when he decompresses.

"Sure you are," says Jim.  
"I'll throw up."  
"Nah, you won't. I saw you give yourself that anti-emetic earlier."  
"I checked with my physician first. Turned out I thought it was a good idea. Jim, I'm not doing this."  
"You're tethered. This is your last IPA class. You don't do this, you're going to be stuck Earthside."  
"I'm okay with that."  
"Nah, you're not. Who the hell else is going to cure strange new diseases and save the lives of new species? When I make captain, who the hell else am I gonna demand as my CMO? Face it, Bones. You're doing this."

Bones is too busy trying not to think about it to answer him. He pulls on the carabiner that's attached to the unreassuringly-thin anchor point on the wall. The instructor has told them it's made of the same stuff as starship hulls, able to withstand incredible stresses, but it's still only the diameter of his smallest finger. He takes a step away from it, head turned to watch the thin fullerine cable attached to it unwind from the spool embedded in his suit at the small of his back. He yanks, and it doesn't give.

Jim Goddamn Kirk is depressurizing the airlock. Anti-emetic or no anti-emetic, he swallows down his bile. Vomiting in microgravity, in an enclosed space like the helmet of a pressure suit, is a terrible idea. Here lies Leonard H. McCoy, who choked to death on his own vomit while stone-cold sober. The light on the external door winks from red to green, and Bones wants to call out and tell Jim to stop, but he's too occupied with not throwing up. It's like he blinks and the door is open, a circle of cold empty space full of mercilessly steady stars waiting on the other side, and he can see the other students, arms and legs spread, twirling gently at the end of their tethers, waiting for them.

They look dead. The instructor's asked for no chatter on the public channels, but he switches over anyway now that the airlock is open, as per protocol - _see, you Starfleet paperpushers with more budget than sense, I was paying attention_ \- and he can hear them all breathing. They're not dead. Jim, meanwhile, has waved at him, turned to the void, and pushed off. He's jumped a little harder than he should have, and when his kilometre of line has unspooled, he comes to a halt with a jerk and a muffled "oof". Bones feels vaguely satisfied until he realizes it's just him left. He releases his grip on the anchor point, reaches for the lip of the airlock, and stops again.

-it's empty so empty _my god_ there's nothing there except eternity and twenty-three idiots spinning like starfish caught on fishing lines so empty and there's nothing to catch him and goddamnit this is goddamn ridiculous and why the hell is his private channel light blinking there must be a malfunction because they're supposed to be on a public channel and -

He switches just in case it's not a malfunction, and there's Jim Kirk's infuriatingly calm voice telling him to breathe. That's stupid. He's breathing. Breathing too fast, even, and the realization gives him the opportunity to slow down a bit, take deeper breaths.

He still wants to throw up.

"Listen to me, Bones. Bones, do you copy? McCoy, do you copy?"  
"... yeah."  
"When you're my CMO I promise you'll never have to do this if you don't want to. But you have to do it now. I'll buy the drinks later. What happened to a surgeon needing to keep his head in every circumstance, huh?"  
"Shut up, kid."

Bones switches back to the public channel, and grips the edge of the _Garneau_ 's hatch more steadily. There's no air in the airlock either, he tells himself firmly, no gravity, only the magnetics on his boots keeping sole to metal. There's no fundamental difference between out there and in here, except that out there is _out there_.

He disengages the magnetics, and changes his mind halfway through his launch, so that he drifts glacially out of the hatch into space. His classmates are there waiting for him, and the instructor's voice says quietly, "well done, Cadet". Belatedly he remembers that the instructor's suit has extra readouts monitoring his students' biosigns, and that his elevated pulse and respiration were public knowledge. He reaches the end of his tether with a gentle tug and hangs there, facing eternity. The stars sure as hell don't feel a kilometre closer. He turns to look back at the _Garneau_ , training ship for thousands of cadets, and she's there hanging sweetly from nothing, and behind her, there is the Moon.

He swallows and closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, the Moon is still there, a thin crescent with the Earth and the Sun off to the right. The Moon seems huge, larger than he's ever seen it - because he's closer to it than he's ever been, he thinks, and keeps breathing. It's a steady presence, something solid to focus on, and suddenly he loves it again, loves it the way Joanna did when he woke her up in the middle of the night and took her outside to watch an eclipse.

"Look, Little Bird," he rumbles, and is told to shut up by the instructor who is beginning the lesson proper.


End file.
